State funding for political parties is not the answer

It was only going to be a matter of time before Lefties started using l'affaire Mandy-Osborne-Deripaska to resuscitate their campaign for the nationalisation of party funding. Sure enough, here is Martin Kettle in the Guardian:

"Without it [state funding] we condemn politicians to solicit money from potential supporters and thus to encourage the destructive sanctimony of MPs and writers who make a living out of smugness."

Hang on: no money changed hands. This is, as David Cameron joked last week, the first financial scandal to have involved no finance. In any case, the sum being tossed around was Â£50,000: the ceiling on individual donations voluntarily imposed by the Tories. To put that in context, the next general election will cost the main parties upwards of Â£20 million each. But, to repeat, no money changed hands. The system, in other words, worked.

If the episode is newsworthy, it is not because it has revealed corruption. Rather, it has revealed something softer – if no less irksome to voters. The chief interest in the whole business is in how politicians operate: the way they hobnob across party lines while their constituents struggle with the recession.

Now ask yourself this. If political parties were able to compel donations by force of law, rather than having to ask politely, would that make them less arrogant, or more?

The alternative to state funding needn't be reliance on either big corporations or trade unions. The internet has changed all that. Barack Obama raised hundreds of millions of dollars from more than three million online donors, giving an average of $85 each. If British parties were unable to do the same, perhaps they should try getting by with less. That, after all, is what everyone else is having to do as a result of their wretched tax rises.